I don't buy high end cards, I never have, I like spending 100-150$ on cards every generation (or every other in some cases, like my current situation) I wanted a card with the DX10 feature set, so I waited. Now that AMD and Nvidia have released their mid-range series of cards, I am incredibly disappointed. The 8600GTS's hardly contend with the 7600GT's and under perform the 7900GS by a long margin, the 2600 series is even further behind. Whats the deal?

Why did AMD and Nvidia choose to neglegct the midrange series of cards this generation? Is anyone else incredibly disapointed with the 8600 and 2600 series of cards?

hirantha

07-12-07, 12:10 PM

AMD and Nvidia would like to get rich overnight thats why you dont see midrange..
no seriously i think the previous years statistics have shown that money to be made in high end and low end.

3NZ0

07-12-07, 01:44 PM

I think it's due to the 'can't have the midrange performing too well.' style of thinking.
Feature wise the new midrange cards are great bits of kit. I think the one main advantage of the 2600 and 8600 over the 7600 and x1600 is the dx10 capability's and media centre capability's, though chances are they won't be fast enough to make any use of the eyecandy dx10 offers due to the speeds of the cards.

Oh and in reference to your sig, k8l is a lower power version of k8 :p

nemecb

07-12-07, 01:57 PM

I would have to agree. If I can stand to I'm probably going to skip this generation and hope that the 9-series or whatever has some decent mid-range offerings. If I can't I'll probably get an 8800 GTS so that I actually get a performance boost in the process, instead of just some extra features that I probably won't use until the next gen anyway. It would probably cost more than all of my past video cards put together though.

npras42

07-12-07, 05:25 PM

I believe that Anandtech has been pretty vocal about its disappointment in both NV/AMD's mid-range card and caught some flak from both companies over it.

Seems that they're sticking to their guns though by disapproving and not giving any kind of recommendation to either company over their mid-range offerings.

I'm not gonna link... there's a couple of articles pretty much on the front page just about these cards.

Madpistol

07-12-07, 05:41 PM

Here's the solution...

Spend $250-300 and get an 8800 GTS 320mb. Problem solved.

Seriously, this generation, you get what you pay for. Some generations before this, the top end has been severely overrated and overpriced, so more people bought the mid-end products. This time around, everything is priced proportionally, and therefore nvidia has sold a lot more 8800 series cards.

You can't expect to pay $150 for a card and get 75% the performance of a $300 card. That's just bad marketing.

Mussels

07-13-07, 03:23 AM

The problem with buying an 8800GTS is say, i want my second PC to have a decent (as in, smooth framerates at lower settings) video card, thats compatible with my 8800GTX drivers (so that i have a spare card, or i can move the GTX to the second system for lans)

That leaves me with the expensive 8800 series, or the slow ass 8500 series - the 8600 cards are decent speed, but so damned expensive.

CaptNKILL

07-13-07, 07:14 AM

The 8600GTS's hardly contend with the 7600GT's and under perform the 7900GS by a long margin, the 2600 series is even further behind. Whats the deal?

I'll be the first to admit that the 86xx series is underwhelming, but I think you're exaggerating a bit. An 8600GT (around $115) is still a pretty damn good card for the price , and will match a 7900GS ($125) in almost every situation... and the GTS ($165)will obviously be a little bit quicker.

The 8800 GTS 320mb is by far the best bang for the buck right now though. Even with its relatively low amount of memory, its probably one of the sweetest video card deals in years. In most cases it ranks right up with the top dogs, yet it costs less than half as much as most of them. Sort of like the Geforce 4 Ti 4200 was back in the day, except now the top end cards are $150 more.

It'll show its age faster because its powerful enough to max out its memory capacity, but it'll be a hell of a quick card for a long time.

Wester547

07-15-07, 02:04 PM

Sort of like the Geforce 4 Ti 4200 was back in the day, except now the top end cards are $150 more.More like how the Radeon 9500 Pro was back in the day, except that didn't last very interminately. :-P

For $200, you had a card that easily outstripped the GeForce 4 Ti 4200 in all facets, was easily on-par if not faster than a Ti4600 (but with SM2.0 support) and wasn't that far-off from the Radeon 9700 Pro. At least, not enough so to impact overall enjoyment. In the 8800 GTS's case, $300 for great performance in current generation games and decent performance in the next generation, with SM4.0 support to boot. The only downer is only 320MB of VRAM, but, as stated before me, for the speed, feature set and price it's unbeatable. As for the topic at hand? I'm not very elated with their offerings either, but the posters do bring up a point - I think if nVidia's midrange offerings (and ATi's) were even twice as fast as they are now then people would stop buying the higher-end cards rather quickly. I don't say that with any reservation. I think myself that the GeForce 8600 series should have 64 stream processors, and that the 8500 series should be as fast as the 8600 series is in comparison (and a similar case, in some sense, for ATi's Radeon HD 2600 / 2400 series), but to each his own.